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Installing kaikai

The command-line tool is called kai. The recommended path is the official installer; Homebrew also works, and you can build from source if you want to change the compiler itself.

Official installer · macOS (Apple Silicon)

A rustup-style installer with no dependencies:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kaikailang-org/kaikai/main/install.sh | sh

It downloads the latest release, verifies its SHA-256, installs it under ~/.kaikai/ and adds ~/.kaikai/bin to your PATH. Verify the install:

kai --version

The binary is self-contained: LLVM is statically linked, and it compiles to native code with no clang or external toolchain. To update later:

kai upgrade

Homebrew

The official distribution also lives in its own tap.

brew install kaikailang-org/kaikai/kaikai

On a Homebrew install, updates go through brew upgrade kaikai, not kai upgrade.

From source

You only need this to change the compiler itself, or on platforms the installer does not ship binaries for yet (prebuilts today are macOS on Apple Silicon). It requires a cc and the LLVM development headers (located via llvm-config):

git clone https://github.com/kaikailang-org/kaikai
cd kaikai
make all

The bootstrap regenerates the compiler from nothing but a C compiler: stage 0 (C) builds kaic0, which compiles the minimal compiler kaic1, which compiles the full self-hosted compiler.

Your first program

Save this as hello.kai:

fn main() {
  println("hello, kaikai")
}

Then run it:

kai run hello.kai
# hello, kaikai

To produce a native binary instead of running directly:

kai build hello.kai -o hello
./hello

What's next

Browse the examples.
Read the book for the long-form walkthrough of the language with real programs.
Visit the GitHub repo and open an issue if something seems off.